Do not go gentle into that good night

40 years after Liviu Ciulei got a prize in Cannes, the Palme d'Or goes to Bucharest.
The movie "Four months, three weeks, two days" follows the fashionable pattern - "say goodbye to the past smilingly". The topic has to be a bit cruel, but the treatment should give up the manicheist approach in early nineties. The main stand is - Romania "before" was not thaaat horrible, there was a human touch on it. Guess what, the human touch were the humans. Even those who weren't finally that human. I noticed the trend since years. I did not see it, but one comes to know how prizes are won. The politically correct of the moment. Consolation prize for a cinematography in a country that had been kept too long on a waiting list, on the other side of the door to the civilised Europe. But now everything is honey and milk.

In the '70s there was a heartbreaking movie on a similar topic, based on a fait divers: the death of a young woman who got an illegal abortion provoked by a criminal midwife. The tragedy in the "Postals with greenfield flowers" (starring Carmen Galin, Romanian cinema beauty for some 30 years) is the same as in the 2007 Palme d'Or winning movie: the drama of undesired pregnancy in a world in which women where many times victims: they lacked education on safe sex; abortion was illegal and they risked life and freedom; they were humiliated if single mothers, repudiated by families and friends. Women did not only lacked information, they, almost logically (if this is logical) lacked means of protection, condoms and little more, no pill, no sterilet, nothing. In a society in which virginity was still an asset, a woman's life was worth much less than her virginity. And this was the approach a men raised by..other women.

Did not see the 2007 movie, I presume it is more a comment than a document. Or maybe it is a document. A funny argument: Cristian Mungiu is 39. He is part (as I am) of that generation of "decretei" (ie "children born by decree"), children born after Ceausescu gave a decree forbidding abortion on demand. From 1967 - as in the rest of Europe at the time - women could only abort if the baby was result of rape, or if their life was at stake because of that pregnancy. This meant that, on one side, lots of unwanted kids came to the world, many lives were broken or lost and a flourishing trade with illegal human butchery, performed by illetrate midwives (sometimes persons not even with any medical training) on kitchen tables, poor anesthaesia, if any, no follow-up, everything performed under the blackest secrecy. For astronomic prices at market price of the day.

The Palme d'Or goes tonight to Bucharest, everybody is happy. Tears on the cheeks. Hopefully this may re-open a discussion and make some justice to Romanian women. To our mothers. Should we nourish hope?